[phr]

Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities, kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems, political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.

[dhimes]

I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school students would use an office suite for.

Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their "planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching" lesson plan.

When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to "save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would be much easier than that initial training.